Finding Purpose in Sorrow

Purpose for Sorrow is Brood Blood-Kyn's personal journal. It is titled from the text written in the front flap of the journal, was traimmed down into the same-titled pamphlet of the House of Sorrows.

Excerpts

You don't lose your mind so much as give it away. It's not wrestled out of your hands in the end. You just are in so much pain from holding onto it that you decide, okay, fine, this isnt worth this pain. So you let go, and your mind, your mental wellbeing, is gone.

And something inside of you starts screaming, and it never stops.

"I feel pain, all the time, a pain which no medical or magical treatment has ever been able to save. It's a wound on my soul that I would have to destroy my soul to remove, and even by then it might be coded into my very nerves that their default state must be to always be groaning in pain, or screaming.

Every hell which every Kind has ever made describes their hells as places of eternal torment. I ask you: I live in constant torment in a soul which screams, eternally, in agony, with such intensity that the nerves in my body scream in chorus. What is that, but distilled hell. My mind never sleeps, my body can never keep up. I grew up with this feeling, this constant haunting screaming of pain.

Pain makes the bite of rain intense and intimate. Long walks are expeditions. Morning rituals become a ceremony. Through purpose, the pain became comforting. It was the price, a constant reminder of the richness of life.

— Brood Blood-Kyn

The tapestry shifted like an earthquake sending sharp stones clawing into the sky. The stones morphed into snow capped mountains seen from a birds eye view. And then the crests became the crests of waves, white with foam and glittering with moonlight as seen from below, from under the water.

And I saw a woman drowning, dress snagged on rocks, trying to stick her hand above the water, trying to be seen, to be helped.

I'm in pain all the time. Nothing severe but it's always there like a high pitched whistle in my ears keeping me tense, alert, focused. Not even always in a productive way—I can be inside my head and put my outside in danger, I can hyperfocus on the outside and neglect the inside. But that tension means I'm always aching in some way—back tightens, neck twinges, jaw aches from grinding, eyes burning from exhaustion. I feel it define the way I move, until it feels like little involuntary convulsions.

Like I'm drowning.

That's how anxiety feels.

Like I'm drowning. All the time.

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Type

Journal, Personal

He saw in her eyes a hate he had only ever seen in the mirror.

And for one moment they shared a bond in their total loathing of him.

"You're so beautiful," he said, smiling and closing his eyes as her scream of rage pealed through his ears. An avalanche of her spells rolled over him, reducing him to nothing but chunks.